National Public Radio's The Salt has a piece, produced by the Center for Public Integrity, that looks at the "system that ushers new food products to market," suggesting that it "is rife with conflicts of interest."
An excerpt:
"The food industry regularly turns to a small group of scientists — including several with ties to Big Tobacco — to determine whether additives it is adding to food products are safe. And these relationships often allow food companies to avoid a rigorous pre-market government safety review, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of publicly available data."
The argument is that federal law allows companies to avoid rigorous government oversight if they can demonstrate a consensus that their products and additives are safe ... but that this consensus often emerges from scientists of questionable integrity. It is, says one attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), "funding bias on steroids."
You can read the entire story here.
An excerpt:
"The food industry regularly turns to a small group of scientists — including several with ties to Big Tobacco — to determine whether additives it is adding to food products are safe. And these relationships often allow food companies to avoid a rigorous pre-market government safety review, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of publicly available data."
The argument is that federal law allows companies to avoid rigorous government oversight if they can demonstrate a consensus that their products and additives are safe ... but that this consensus often emerges from scientists of questionable integrity. It is, says one attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), "funding bias on steroids."
You can read the entire story here.
- KC's View:
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If it were up to me, I'd compile a list of every scientist who suggested that tobacco does not addict and kill its users, and make sure that every time any of those names came up in any context, their research and conclusions would be dismissed out of hand. End of story.
Then again, maybe that's just me.
